Bob sent this to ihub members: "please click ads"
Sent by: Bob Zumbrunnen Date: 10/12/2002 1:37:46 PM
Features Update, etc, etc, etc.
It's been a while since I've messaged everyone to let them know what's changed here, so here goes...
1. We've added a couple of "toys". That's what happens when a programmer gets bored late at night and is tired of real work. The toys I've added are "WordFind" and "Anagram Solver". WordFind is real helpful as a Crossword-helper. If you've got a word that you only know a few characters of, type it in, using underscores to represent character you don't have, and it'll search our 250,000 word spelling dictionary and tell you which words fit the pattern. The anagram solver lets you type in a scrambled word and it'll search the same dictionary for all words that can be made with those letters. It doesn't do multi-word anagrams, though, and likely never will. I just did it as a programming exercise and to see just how quickly I could make an anagram solver run. I'm very pleased with the results.
2. Taglines: We're collecting tagline recommendations on #board-1152 so we can print the best ones on the back of a t-shirt we'll be producing and selling soon. We're collecting them until 10/21/02 then using a Survey to let everyone vote on their favorites. The dozen or so (depending on how many will fit) favorites will be included on the back of the t-shirts and the submitters of the selected taglines will get a free t-shirt.
We expect to have the t-shirts available for online purchase in November and will follow that with other merchandise.
3. Surveys: I wrote a "Survey Engine" that lets me just plug survey questions and possible answers into the database then when you take the survey, the answers are stored separately from any user info. On surveys, all we care about is the answers; not who answered what to which questions. When you've completed a survey, the fact that you've completed it is logged in a separate table so nobody can take a particular survey more than once.
Included in the initial batch of Surveys is a Demographic Survey. Taking the survey is completely optional, but we'd appreciate as much participation as possible. You can even opt out of each question by selecting "No Answer".
The Demographic Survey can be reached by going to the "Other" menu, selecting Surveys, then selecting the first one. With all (or maybe most) other surveys, you'll be able to check on the voting results, but only I will see the results of the Demographic Survey and then only to compile aggregate info to present to prospective advertisers.
We're gathering this info so we can attract a better kind of advertising. Ads that people will actually be interested in and might click from time to time.
If you've previously done the Demographic Survey, please fill it out again. Because I changed some of the possible answers and added a number of questions to help us focus our advertising better, I've removed all previous answers and fill-out confirmations.
4. Speaking of ads, one of the barriers to getting a better calibre of advertiser here is that click-throughs lately have been really low. If you're an ad-viewing member (not grandfathered and not a subscriber), I'd really appreciate it if you'd check out the ads from time to time. It wouldn't hurt if you'd occasionally click on one to check it out. Say, once every 50 or so times you view different pages on the site. I strongly suspect that one of the problems with our low clickthroughs is that anybody and everybody can have Favorites and Board auto-refresh for them, so they're likely getting delivered ads they're not even at their computer to see. Because of that, I've made Auto-refresh a Premium feature to see if that helps. It could be that it's not the clicks that're too low but the impressions that're too high. Still, if you're not a subscriber, please check out the ads occasionally and click on a few.
Currently, we get about 1 click per 5,000 ads when the industry standard is about 1 click per 200 or less. It's that bad, and all ad-viewing members can help out quite a bit. Remember, one benefit is that with higher clickthrough ratios to show advertisers, we can get higher quality ads.
But don't click the "You are a Winner" ads. I think most of us know how annoying it is when you click that and get windows on your screen that're difficult to get rid of. I'm still trying to figure out who that advertiser is on ValueClick so I can exclude them.
5. Getting back to new features: If you go to the Boards menu, you'll see a lot of options where there used to be only one. It's pretty self-explanatory.
6. Keep checking the Surveys menu from time to time. There will be a survey added in the not-too-distant future having to do with the company itself that'll be of particular interest to paid Subscribers. I can't really say more about it yet, but details will be forthcoming.
Thanks,
Bob Zumbrunnen
PS. Click those ads from time to time. |
